Call for Papers: Why Spatial is Special in Education, Learning, and Everyday Activities

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CR:PI) is pleased to invite you to submit to our new thematic series on spatial ability and spatial thinking.

Co-organizers:

- Professor Toru Ishikawa - Professor Nora Newcombe

People's thinking about, with, and in space has been extensively studied in the literatures of psychology, education, and other related fields. In the context of education, researchers have shown that spatial ability correlates significantly, over and above mathematical and verbal ability, with students' interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering, geoscience, anatomy, and surgery, and affects their eventual occupational choices.

A more encompassing perspective than spatial ability is spatial thinking, i.e., thinking about and thinking with space in a flexible manner, coupled with an understanding of domain-specific knowledge, sometimes called spatial literacy or even the "fourth R." Importantly, spatial thinking includes navigation, as well as thinking with spatial distributions, such as reading a weather map in a newspaper. The existence of large individual differences in the extent, accuracy, and flexibility of internal representations of our spatial environments is now stimulating research. The pervasive availability of geospatial information raises concern about negative effects on people’s geospatial literacy and awareness.

This special issue aims to bring together articles on questions such as: What is spatial thinking? Is it related to spatial ability and other abilities? To academic achievements in different fields? Can it be taught and trained? Brought into the classroom? We invite you to contribute.

Please email either or both of the guest editors with any questions about submissions.

Manuscripts should be submitted before September 1, 2019. You can find manuscript submission details here.

CRPI is the open access journal of the Psychonomic Society. Its mission is to publish use-inspired basic research: fundamental cognitive research that grows from hypotheses about real-world problems. As with all Psychonomic Society journals, submissions to CRPI are subject to rigorous peer review.

For manuscripts accepted for the special issue, the publication fee may be fully or partially waived depending on the number of manuscripts accepted for the special issue. The authors should indicate when they submit a manuscript if they are requesting a waiver of the publication fee.